T-Mobile decided that it would be a good idea sell fantastic routers at a great price to try and then use those routers to expand their cell coverage, and you know what? It is a good idea. Unfortunately for them they decided to repurpose the very popular Asus RT-AC68U to do it, so everyone and their brother used Asus’ great firmware tools to flash the T-Mobile CellSpots to either stock Asus firmware or high end custom firmware. This of course displeased T-Mobile since the whole point of selling routers cheap is to expand their cell range, so they had Asus make the routers harder to hack, but guess what? Nerds like me are still hacking these routers and they work great!
I am not going to go in to detail on how to hack a T-Mobile CellSpot since there are a great many good guides online, but I will say if you buy a CellSpot now you will need to follow this step first: Press All The Buttons, and then I followed this video:
Until he put custom firmware on it. Instead I went the ‘official route’ and flashed the router to firmware version 376.3626 with the Asus Recovery Tool to change the memory size to 64 MB from 32 MB, and then after that simply applied the most recent firmware from the Asus site. You can download everything you need from the links included on this page: SlickDeals Asus Page.
Overall this router has been a major step up from my Asus RT-N66U. Everything is just faster, plus there are more options, and it feels good knowing that I got to stick it to the man a little bit by only paying $60 for a $150 router. Though I think this model is still worth it even if you pay full price and don’t want to bother rewriting boot loaders. If you haven’t got an AC router yet, there aren’t many consumer routers available better than the Asus RT-AC68U.